Happy Frickin' Birthday, Nation At Risk

Lots of folks are offering up word salad to commemorate the 35th anniversary of "A Nation at Risk," the high profile educational chicken-littling that laid the foundation for all the disaster capitalistic attacks on education ever since.

On this occasion, here's the article you must not miss.

None of the information in Anya Kamenetz's piece is new; some is from interviews she conducted years ago for her 2015 book The Test. There are critical points to remember here.

Results Decided First

But what I learned in talking to two of the original authors of “A Nation At Risk” was that they never set out to undertake an objective inquiry into the state of the nation’s schools.

The most common interpretation of the report is something along the lines of "back in 1983, a bunch of folks decided to do a big old study of public education and see how it was doing, and golly bob howdy-- didn't they discover that US education was a giant suckfest!"

That interpretation, Kamenetz's interviews make clear, is incorrect. Actual story? Some folks in the Reagan administration had already decided that there was some sort of crisis in education, so they went looking for proof of the conclusion they had already reached. This indicates, if nothing else, that Crisis #1 was that these people had never learned the Scientific Method when they were in school.

It also indicates that the report cherry-picked data to match the conclusion it wanted to draw.

Cherry Picking the Data

The report skimmed over the highest-ever graduation numbers. And it focused on the decline of average SAT scores over the previous twenty years. And while that data point was not exactly a lie, it was also not the truth.

Kamenetz brings back the follow-up report, done by the Department of Energy in 1990-- a report that found "To our surprise, on nearly every measure, we found steady or slightly improving trends." For instance, average SAT scores were dropping-- because more and more students were taking the test. Each subgroup was actually improving, but adding more of the lower-scoring subgroups to the mix dropped the average.

ANAR Repeatedly Debunked

If you want more articles poking holes in the 1983 report, they're out there. Kamenetz highlights a 2004 scholarly article by James Guthrie who concludes simply "The idea that American schools were worse just wasn't true."

But If You Really Want To Evaluate ANAR, Just Check the Sky

The report concluded, among other things "The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and as a people."

In 1983, they told us that the sky is falling. It's falling any day now. If we don't act right away, America is doomed! Any day now. And yet, since 1983, two things have not happened.

First, nobody from DC has ever announced, "Yeah, you can relax. We totally fixed it." No, instead, our leader types still routinely announce that, as our Secretary of Education announced at the Reagan Institute's anniversary party, "Our nation is still at risk." And yet--

Second, in thirty-five years, the sky has not fallen. The nation has not collapsed. The supposed decline in education has not led to a disastrous disintegration of the Republic.

Critics of public education have had 35 years to back up these pre-fabricated cries of a concocted crisis, and yet 35 years later, there's no evidence that the authors of the report were correct.

So Why Do We Still Wave This Bloody Shirt?

The answer is also in Kamenetz's article, because although I do love her work, she is one more member of the education press who has apparently signed a pledge to never run an article that doesn't include a quote from Michael Petrelli. I'm not sure why right-tilted thinky tanks are always represented in ed pieces but working educators and public ed supporters are not (lord knows there are plenty of us out here willing to talk), but on this occasion, Petrilli's quote is pretty illuminating. [Correction: Kamenetz has correctly pointed out that this is her first Petrilli quote in an article.]

Although there has been some progress, “the reason that we continue to mark the anniversary is that [the worry] still rings true,” says Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. He calls the report “a touchstone”; it’s in the mission statement of the Institute, which promotes school choice, testing and accountability.

There you have it. First, we keep bringing it up because it "rings true," which is not at all the same as "is supported by actual data and facts." It just, you know, feels truthy. And it a "touchstone" for reformsters, a key brick in the foundation of all education reform that says public schools are in terrible trouble and we must fix/disrupt/change/replace them right away.

A Nation At Risk remains what it has always been-- someone who wants to tear down a school and replace it with a business, so he pulls the school fire alarm to get everyone to run out of the building. But after 35 years, there's still no fire, still little smoke, and ironically the smoke at this point all comes from the various fires that reformsters have built to help clear the place out. 

Despite the lack of solid evidence to back it up, "A Nation at Risk" will continue to live on because it is useful for the people who want to dismantle and privatize public education. It was created as a tool for that purpose in the first place, and as long as it can still serve that purpose, we'll continue to throw it birthday parties and trot it out whenever we want to get the sirens wailing again. Those are the moments when the rest of us will need to step up and remind people what the report really is, how it was really written, how much the sky hasn't fallen yet, and why it's not nice to yell "fire" in a crowded school. In other words, after you read the Kamenetz article, you probably need to bookmark it. 

Making Trouble (or "Other Lessons of West Virginia, Arizona, et. al.")

"Can you just handle this but leave my name out of it?"

I'll bet most union local presidents have heard some version of that phrase at least once. Teachers tend to be non-confrontational authority-respecters, so when the People In Charge do us wrong, we want the problem to go away without us having to make any trouble.

The thing is, at that point, the trouble is already made. The only question is how we are going to handle the trouble.

Some of the worst administrators in the country are enabled by their staffs. I don't that they're enabled by toadying co-conspirators, like the hyenas in the Lion King-- though those types certainly exist. No, I mean the teachers who simply do nothing, record nothing, report nothing. I mean the teachers who call their union leaders and say, "My principal said this highly unprofessional thing to me and too this abusive action against me, and I want to make him stop, but I don't want my name attached to it and don't mention the specifics or he'll know it was me." Which means the union leader is left going to the district with a complaint of, "Somebody did something wrong to somebody sometime in one of the buildings." Not surprisingly, this gets few results.

It's not my intent to blame victims here. There are states and districts and schools where the power balance is way out of wack and teachers can't voice the slightest complaint without risking their job (this is, of course, true at almost all charter schools). I don't envy anyone who has to make a choice between calling out unethical behavior and putting food on their family table. 

But there are also situations in which the teacher in question wants to keep things quiet because "he'll be mean to me" or "he'll yell at me." There are schools where teachers volunteer hundreds or thousands of hours of work for free, complain bitterly about it to each other-- but then keep doing it, hoping somehow that administration will see that this makes the teachers sad, and so will be moved to stop making such requests.

Here's a rule you can absolutely count on-- if you say nothing and do nothing, nothing will change.

Every time Principal Asshat is abusive to staff and nobody says or does anything, he gets the message that he is free to be just as abusive as he wants to be. If you think silence, appeasement and avoidance will lead to a morning when he wakes up and says, "You know, I think I should stop being an abusive asshat today," I have aa bridge over some swampland to sell you.

The teachers or West Virginia, Colorado, Arizona, Oklahoma and Kentucky waited for a long time for their legislatures to stop being abusive asshats. It didn't work. Walking out and calling them out seems to be producing better results than suffering (or quitting). 

I know, I know. You don't want to get all political. You just want to close the door to your room and teach. You don't want to provoke Principal Asshat into new paroxysms of asshattery. But there are two things to remember--

1) You've already got a cancer in your building, and it will not improve on its own. You didn'r ask for it,; you didn't create it-- but it's there. You have only two choices-- you can either make things better or make things worse. Doing nothing just lets the cancer grow. Things will get worse.

2) Never underestimate your ability to be a counter-friction to the machine. The old playground rules about standing up to bullies still apply.

True story: In one district, a principal decided to flex her boss muscles over her two buildings, so she started calling nuisance staff meetings at the end of the day, so that between student dismissal and teacher dismissal, teachers couldn't get work done. At School A, the teachers showed up for the every-other-day meetings, sat politely but sadly, complained to each other afterwards, and a couple asked the union to "do something but leave my name out of it." At School B, the teachers showed up for the meetings with their stacks of papers from the day, and as Principal Asshat rambled on about nothing, the teachers all had their heads down grading papers. Guess where the principal decided to stop having meetings first? Yes, School B.

I'm sure there are other stories (feel free to share them in the comments) all the way up to teachers who have had to stand up to their bosses in court. Other teachers look at these sorts of things and say, "I just don't want that kind of trouble. I don't want to stir things up."

But sometimes trouble finds you. It may well be that your preferred choice would be for there to be no trouble, but sometimes that choice isn't available. You can only chose from among the options that you have, and it is sadly true that administrators and politicians can remove all the desirable options in a situation. 

If you're still reluctant to stand up, this is the time to remember that your working conditions are students' learning conditions. One of the things students learn at school is how grownups function in the workplace. And everything else they learn is colored by the atmosphere of that workplace. What do you want your students to learn? And what kind of atmosphere do you want them to do their learning in? 

Look-- I'm not saying to get yourself fired over a policy about how many copies you're allowed. And I'm not saying you should raise a giant stink every time you don 't get your favorite parking space or the cafeteria runs out of your favorite flavor of ice cream. That really is making trouble. You have to be smart about how you pick your battles and how you fight them. 

When things are really wrong, doing nothing doesn't help. And we have an obligation to our students to speak out and stand up. 

ICYMI: April Showers Edition (4/29)

My new desktop is in the shop, again, so we're struggling here, but I still have some good reads for you from this week.

Bill Gates Is the Latest Billionaire Funders of Cunningham's EdPost

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider is just as prolific as I am, and she does valuable research, as in this piece that peels back the financial covers on Education Post, the operation into which reformsters are pouring millions of dollars.

The Soul Crushing Student Essay

Yep. This is still a thing.

Personalized Learning and Why Not To

One more look at the problems with this emerging trend

Dispelling Three Teacher Myths

From Arizona, three responses to some of the baloney leveled against teachers.

The GOP Must Hate Public Schools.

A blistering op-ed about the GOP assault on public ed

Teaching Machines, or How the Automation of Education Became Personalized Learning.

Nobody draws lines between history and the present like Audrey Watters. Here's some critical background on the emergence of personalized [sic] learning

AZ: It's More Than Money

I've been through two teacher strikes in my career, one as a rank and file member and one as a local union president. If you are not a teacher, here' a thing you need to understand about teacher strikes-- it's really hard to get teachers to walk off the job.

That's why I'm struck by the following data points from Arizona.

Number of teachers who walked out Thursday and filled up the streets of the capital: 50,000 to 75,000.

Number of public school teachers in Arizona: about 50,000.

That is astonishing. Remember that teachers are a large and varied group with a lot of disagreement about politics (remember, 1/3 of NEA members voted for Donald Trump). How do you get such massive support for a walkout-- particularly in a right-to-work state where a work stoppage is illegal and the consequences are potentially grim?

Easy. You make the consequences of doing nothing even grimmer.

Arizona has been quietly but resolutely competing for the crown of Worst State for Education in the US, and they have made some real headway. In fact, the teacher walkout has already been going on for several years-- just one at a time. Teachers have been walking out all along; it's just that Thursday saw the trickle become a torrent. Arizona has a huge teacher shortage and while it periodically studies the problem, it refuses to learn anything useful from those studies. Meanwhile, they keep turning up sobering statistics like those from a study released in April of 2017:

* 42% of the teachers hired in 2013 left within three years.
* 74% of AZ superintendents report shortages of teachers
* When you adjust for cost of living, AZ elementary teachers are the lowest paid in the nation. High school teachers come in 48th.

But it's not just the pay (though the stories of teachers taking multiple jobs just to make ends meet are legion and troubling all on their own-- but there's more to it.

Arizona has followed the Florida model for privatization-- if you don't have enough demand for charter schools, then help create the demand by gutting public schools. It's disaster capitalism with a man-made disaster. And in this case, the leading men in disaster creating are the Koch bothers. As Derek Black notes:

At a policy conference in California in January, they announced plans to support a statewide referendum that could shovel even more taxpayer money into private schools. When they offered Gov. Ducey the podium, he was all in. "I didn't run for governor to play small ball. I think this is an important idea," he said. Next door, Nevada's state supreme court recently declared just this type of voucher idea unconstitutional because it put finding priorities for private education ahead of public education.

Arizona is determined to divert money away from public school and into charter business pockets, and that means making sure that charter operators are free to do as they please. Tracking the money tells a story of wild west style abuse, fraud and graft- but that's the Arizona way. Here's a whole website to browse the many charter abuses.

So Arizona's walkout (like the walkouts in Colorado and Kentucky and West Virginia) is not some old school "I'd like to make more money and get better benefits" strike. These are teachers who have finally realized that their pay and working conditions are not just being diminished, but are being diminished as part of a plan whose endgame is the complete dismantling of public education. And while this may be a red state phenomenon now, there's no reason to think blue states are immune-- after all, these walkouts also signal that teachers are awakening to the realization that there are few politicians (and no party) on the side of public education.

Meanwhile, the legislature includes guys like this asshat who thinks that teachers are just working multiple jobs for the perks like an extra car. And today (Friday) the legislature reportedly scooted out early because those darn teachers came back!

Arizona legislature left early today. Want to know why? 50,000 teachers at their doorstep ready to hold them accountable #RedforEd #TeacherPower pic.twitter.com/xRCEtCqDgI

— Badass Teachers Asso (@BadassTeachersA) April 27, 2018

What gets 75,000 Arizonans walking out for public education? The understanding that if they don't, nobody will, and if nobody will, the future for public education just gets bleaker and bleaker.

Fordham Reports On Ripe Charter Markets

Today the Fordham Institute released what it calls a report on "charter deserts." I think it could be more accurately called an aid for targeting ripe and ready charter school markets, but it comes equipped with some interesting a potentially useful data tools, and so may still be worth a look.

"Charter desert" is the term Fordham uses for "areas of relatively high poverty where there are no charter schools." In other words, places that are ripe for charter picking.

We could put a new charter right next to that cactus

Fordham offers this as a solution to the "problem" of slowing charter growth. Charters have achieved "market share" of over 20% in more than three dozen cities, so maybe it's time to look for "new frontiers." Sure, the report acknowledges, "one option is to start more charters in affluent communities," but, well, let's change the subject and rather than discuss the many reasons that affluent communities have no real interest in charter schools, let's change the subject to market opportunities we may have missed.

Are we overlooking neighborhoods in America that are already home to plenty of poor kids, and contain the population density necessary to make school choice work, but lack charter school options? Especially communities in the inner-ring suburbs of flourishing cities, which increasingly are becoming magnets for poor and working-class families priced out of gentrifying areas?

To that end, a research team at Miami University of Ohio has assembled an interactive map, and that map is pretty cool. It shows broad blocks of poverty and gives the location (with info) of every charter and every public elementary school. You can zoom in and out and generally swoop around, and while you may not learn anything new, you get a real sense of charter school distribution. Clustered around certain cities in certain states, right where the poverty is. If you ever needed a visual confirmation that charter schools are largely a method of using the urban poor as a mans of extracting money from the government, here it is.

The report duly notes that some of those blocks of poverty are too sparsely populated to offer real charter marketing opportunities. But the rest as just waiting. The two "key takeaways" mentioned are that charters need to move beyond city boundaries, and that states need to be convinced to open up markets to charters.

The whole framing of the document is what you get when your priority is "expanding charter schools reach" and not "improve education for students in poor regions." The map could just as easily be called a map to places where states should be investing extra resources to help combat the endemic poverty of the region. But the goal here is "to provide more charter options" and not "to make the best use of tax dollars" or "to insure that every US student gets a great education." This is a document aimed at people who are advising investors, not at people who are serious about improving US education.

Instead, we ought to go back to the part about wealthy neighborhoods not being great charter markets (or being labeled charter deserts, either) and consider what it tells us-- that when public schools are properly funded and resourced, few people are interested in having choices. If someone is providing you with all the food and water you need, it's less worrisome to be in the middle of a desert.

The College Readiness Problem

At Ed Reform Now, Chad Aldeman (Bellwether) has revisited a chart from three years ago which shows a shift in our country's education level. Here's the chart:

The data actually are about two questions-- how many people over twenty-five have "less than a high school diploma" and how many people over twenty-five have attained "some college,. no degree." That means the chart has a double lag-- it was completed with 2013 data, and that data from over-twenty-fives would cover choices that people made 5-10(ish) years prior to that. That may make some of the specifics open to debate, but the lag doesn't really change the obvious long term trend. 

Assuming that this trend has continued for the last five years, we now have more college dropouts than high school dropouts. Interesting factoid-- but what does it mean?

Aldeman offers three ideas about the implications.

1) The low hanging fruit for high school graduation have all been picked. The higher graduation rate for high schools may represent some gaps in terms of students actually learning, and we may have run out of students that can be pushed through the system.

That's certainly a possibility. If the infamous bell curve is to be believed, there will always be a certain percentage of students who will be on the lagging end. That does raise a question though-- the above graph is based on raw numbers rather than percentages. Now I'm wondering what the chart looks like if we run percentages rather than raw numbers.

2) The ed reform crowd has mostly ignored higher education. Aldeman wants to see more "external pressure" brought to bear on colleges and universities rather than letting higher education be driven by its own internal concerns.

This raises a question as well-- what external pressures should reformsters consider, given their less-than-stellar success from bringing external pressures against K-12. Furthermore, the central thesis of K-12 reformsterism has been finding ways to unleash market forces in public education, and when it comes to higher ed, market forces have already been running loose since the invention of dirt. Aldeman, like many reformsters, complains that colleges face "almost no accountability" for student outcomes, but colleges and universities face exactly the kind of market-based accountability that reformsters have sworn would fix K-12 public ed if given the chance. The ed reform crowd will have to make up its mind on this one.

I'll get to Aldeman's third point in a moment, but let me offer some other observations of my own first.

The chart can be read to mean that we have delayed the moment when a person gets off the education train. In other words, folks who used to drop out of high school now hang in until they're partway through college. That's not a terrible thing.

And the big question is why folks are dropping out of college. As Aldeman told me on Twitter, there are many reasons (academics, soft skills, bureaucracy, finances, etc) and no single silver bullet to fix them all. But if we think people should be sticking around in college until graduation, we'll need to narrow down the issues and address them.

Aldeman's third point adds a new possibility to the list. Well, it's new for an ed reform guy to mention it-- some of us have been pointing this out for years.

For example, we’ve enacted a number of reforms over the last 10 years in the name of “college- and career-readiness,” but we failed to make the link to higher education and we forgot that colleges determine which students are college ready. Colleges and universities never signed on to the Common Core movement in any meaningful way...

Yup-- since the day Common Core was introduced through the day when the term was deemed toxic and replaced with the coded phrase "college and career ready," standards champions have insisted that these standards would make all students ready for any major at any college or any career. That's a ridiculous claim (see also Arne Duncan's promise that we would be able to tell an 8-year-old if she was on track for college), and it always has been, rendered even more so by the fact that standards champions have never ever offered a shred of credible evidence that their standards would, in fact, prepare students for college. And now look-- further evidence that they don't.

"College ready" is a complicated and complex condition that exists at the twisty intersection of specific student goals, the specific college, the specific field of study, the specific cultural and family background, the specific financial issues involved, and a dozen other specific factors. Saying someone is "college ready" is like saying that somebody who's currently single is "marriage ready"-- while we can identify ready and not-ready at the extreme ends of the spectrum, most of the scale is taken up by a big, fat, grey middle. One-size-fits-all solutions are actually one-size-fits-nobody solutions.

Aldeman calls the issue here "myopia," and I think that's generous. A key component of ed reform has been the insistence that we can see and predict things that we can neither see nor predict, to insist that we have a system by which we can know things that cannot, in fact, be known. If we want to help more people get through college, step one is to stop trying to dress them in the emperor's new clothes.

When China Buys Our Data

We have worried about what ed tech companies would do with all the data that they could (and do) collect from students. We have worried about the creation of a permanent digital that provides a detailed (but not necessarily accurate) profile of students that could be viewed by future employers. We have worried about ed tech companies and their ability to keep this vast treasure trove of data safe from hackers and data thieves. We have worried about sensitive and specific data about students being stolen and used for God-knows-what.

We have worried about all these things. Now a new piece at EdSurge suggests we have not worried enough.

The title of Jenny Abamu's piece is direct and stark: What Happens to Student Data Privacy When Chinese Firms Acquire U.S. Edtech Companies?

As you might well guess, this is not a rhetorical question. For instance, NetDragon, a Chinese gaming company looking to build an education division (with the "largest learning community globally"), bought Edmodo. Price tag-- $137.5 million. NetDragon just last year snapped up JumpStart, the educational game software company, but Edmodo, which is more of a platform company, has its hands on a huge amount of student data, leaving some to wonder whether NetDragon bought the company for, well, the company, or just its Giant Vault O'Data.

Is this a big deal? Well...

William Carter, the deputy director and fellow of the Technology Policy Program at Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), says US government officials are taking note of these Chinese acquisitions in the tech startup space.

“There is a concern that data is now a strategic resource, and that acquiring companies for their large data sets could be a means by which China could undermine the strategic influence of the United States,” says Carter.

The concern is not merely that China can acquire a ton of data about US citizens (citizens who are young now, but won't always be) but also that companies like Edmodo can become one more way for foreign powers to influence, nudge and control the political and cultural dialogue in the US-- and start wielding that influence early on.

As a responsible journalist, Abamu has asked NetDragon if they are intending to do any of these naughty things, to which the Chinese company replied, "Not us! We're just trying to make some profit here."

Pep So, NetDragon’s Director of Corporate Development, offers one interesting observation about the US education market. Not only is it "mature," but it is unique in that "we have seen patterns like teachers willingly paying annually $500 from their pockets to buy content on their own. Whereas in China we don't see that." Huh. Do tell.

NetDragon hopes to turn Edmodo into a TeachersPayTeachers type business. And when asked about data safety, so replies

Of course we want to protect our users’ data, and we also want to be targeting our users [with products], so that’s always a difficult balance to strike. We don’t have a straight answer about what we can and cannot do and to be honest I don’t think Facebook has one as well.

Which is a ballsy answer, but more diplomatic than, "Hell, you guys don't know what the rules are anyway."

Can the US keep an eye on US data that is now owned by a foreign power? Especially when, as Carter notes, the "lack of transparency" about the what and how of data collection in various online platforms makes it hard for anyone to even begin to know what is going on.

But we do know a few things about the Chinese and data. We know that the Chinese were hugely successful at waving enough money at Google to make them forget the whole "don't be evil" thing and instead help provide more tools for a repressive surveillance state. And we know that China's rulers have long been interested in the idea of giving citizens "social credit" scores based on basically everything they ever do, as monitored by surveillance software, and then using those scores to allow-- or not allow-- certain activities.. These are not good signs in terms of Chinese treatment of US student data.

As I said, we're probably not worried enough.